The NYC-based AI infrastructure startup Substrate raised $8M in seed funding.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with participation by South Park Commons (Vercel), Craft Ventures (Mercury), Will Gaybrick Stripe (Stripe), Guillermo Rauch, (Vercel), Immad Achund (Mercury), and others.
The company plans to use the money to expand its inference solutions market and bring modern AI capabilities for all software engineers.
Substrate, led by CEO Rob Cheung is a provider for an API for modular AI. It allows users to create multi-step AI programs quickly using optimized models, colocated vector and file storage, a code interpretation, and logical flow. Its AI API harnesses curated, open-source AI model across various modalities such as text, images and audio, and optimizes them to run at scale.
Substrate was designed to run multiple-inference programs at the fastest possible speed. The programs are analyzed in a graph format and optimized for parallelism and throughput. All nodes of the graph will be guaranteed to run in the same cluster.
Substack, Maven and others are among the early customers.
FinSMEs
20/06/2024